Transactional Reading

Use:  Fountas and Pinnell to recognize skills and behaviors of the reader and text demands of the text.  This is the thread that connects the two.  Documents are available here (note: they have to be printed on 11 x 17 paper.)

Transactional Reading Notes:

Reader:  habits, reading history, attitude

• Reader's behaviors and skills (FP document)
• Prior Knowledge - activated
• Reading Comprehension Strategy usage - (the hand)... thinking within and beyond the text
• Critical Reading Skills - goal thinking beyond the text
• Text Structures - sequence, cause/effect, compare/contrast, problem/solution, question/answer, description
• Note taking to hold onto learning - writing, thinking, "so what"
• Reading Comprehension strategies closer to text/content: Synthesis = PK + NK(new knowledge) = BK (better knowledge)
• Prior Knowledge - build

Text:  text demands, cohesion, level (content, lexile, structure) all on FP document

From Shades of Meaning by Donna Santman:

• "...picking and choosing across a text as opposed to building the text as a whole is problematic, it is also problematic to attend too much to the text itself.  Reading is a transaction; a relationship develops between the reader and the text that defines meaning.  To make sense of a text, readers bring to it more than their knowledge of the literal words on the page.  They bring all of their understandings and associations to the text to provide a larger context for developing meaning than the words themselves provide (63)."
• "Comprehension, interpretation, and critique involve the reader putting something into the reading event, something that is not present in the text itself."  
• Vaclav Havel, "Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture.  It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs."
• No text (or utterance in speech) is explicit; listeners and readers always must participate in restoring what is missing or filling in implications.
• LOVE THIS:  Readers must bring their memory of experience to a reading event in order to make the text live in their minds.  They must activate their understanding of language, of human intention, of what is likely to occur in the physical world, to infer the meanings of phrases and sentences.  They must use their assumptions of what people are like to attribute motivations to characters and understand what is going on in narrative scenes.  They must connect their understandings of this text to many other texts in order to develop interpretation, a sense of how this text is saying something into the great human conversation.  And they must compare the claims of this text to the world they know in order to critique its assumptions or challenge the existing world.  From literal understanding through the interpretive to the critical, readers must restore missing elements, must co-author what they read (xv).
• The reader must occupy at least two different positions:  she must speak for the text and speak for herself.  She must make sense of what the text is saying (thoughts she could not have made by herself) and also make an answer in response to the text.  Understanding can consist of nothing less (xv).